AP exam high school drop-outs

One man, Jay Mathews, said that the amount of people that take the AP exam is the most important factor in evaluating a school’s academic status, rather than the grades. He actually thinks this idea will work. I think this idea is preposterous. It creates unfair circumstances for schools and children. A problem such as exposing kids to tests they’ll definably fail is a factor that mustn’t be overlooked. Schools, in order to compete, have started to have kids that are under the AP academic level take the AP exam in an effort to raise their academic ranking. This accomplishes nothing but give false results of a school’s academic standing.

In my own high school, there were only two AP classes offered, so unless a student was in those courses, they wouldn’t do well on the exam. However, the AP classes were offered to every social class. It's been noticed that only rich kids have been the ones to take the AP exams. At my high school, people of every race and class were in the AP classes and took the exams. However, my high school wouldn’t have a high academic standing because of the lack of AP classes offered. With this new way of testing though, that will change. It’s not right to have kids from a high school take exams that they know they will do poorly on just because the school wants positive recognition.

Mathews is only looking at one aspect of schools’ academics. There is no way that one can tell how a school is doing by how many of their students take an AP exams. What will he do when high schools across America make taking the AP mandatory? There aren’t rules and restrictions to prevent flaws in his plan and he has already carried his plan out. Perhaps Mathews needs to look at other way to rate a school’s academics. For example, if he still wanted to stick to his people in numbers idea, he could look at how many students go on to college after graduating. Or he could look at the actual test scores. When I took my AP English exam my senior year of high school, there were only four of us taking it. However, we all did very well. Doesn’t that count more than one hundred people taking the exam and doing poorly?

Mathews aim is to strengthen the amount of kids learning AP material in high schools, but it’s much more complicated than administrating more tests. For example, my high school is always trying to expand its AP class repertoire, but there aren’t enough willing or qualified teachers to do it. If Mathews wanted to solve his problem, he should go to the source and find new ways of finding teachers to teach the courses. If my high school offered more courses, than I’m positive more students would take them and excel in learning. Getting into one of our two AP courses offered at my high school is very competitive and can only hold so many students. It’s as if Mathews didn’t consider any other options for improving his rating methods. I don’t think Mathew’s system will last for long because too many schools will find ways around it. When schools start getting outstanding academic ratings and a very small percentage go on to college, people will become suspicious.